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Buckhorn carries his hopes door to door
© St. Petersburg Times Bob Buckhorn knocked on the front door of a long, low ranch house. The man who answered observed that Buckhorn must really want to be mayor of Tampa, if he could stand to be out on a day like Sunday. The man was right. Buckhorn wants it badly, enough to walk under a grim sky, through cold rain, in the face of a merciless wind. He has been campaigning for three years, 12 to 15 hours a day in the last year and a half, has knocked on by his count 7,000 doors. Sunday was just another day on what he owned up to is a "long and lonely journey." He picked two streets in South Tampa, winding streets along the bay in the West Shore neighborhoods of Sunset Park and Beach Park. His pitch was soft, careful. I hardly heard him utter the word vote. "Keep me in mind," he'd say, at stop after stop. The pitch was slightly modified when the person who opened the door admitted loyalties to one of Buckhorn's three major opponents, Pam Iorio, Charlie Miranda or Frank Sanchez. "If they don't make it in the primary," Buckhorn said, "think of us in the runoff." (These are the rules of the game. The election is March 4. If nobody gets at least 50 percent of the votes, a runoff between the top two votegetters will be held three weeks later.) On those two streets Sunday, there were no Buckhorn yard signs. He came face to face with just three sure votes, one from a woman who wanted to know if he went to church (he does), another from an old friend, a real estate developer and his wife. If this bothered Buckhorn, he didn't show it. He said more people than normal may be undecided. And he kept walking. He didn't stop at every house. He worked off a list of the likeliest voters that had been culled from the records of the elections supervisor's office. Nobody can say Buckhorn doesn't do his homework. His campaign proposals fill a booklet two dozen pages long. He has billed himself as the neighborhood candidate, the guy you can count on to get the potholes fixed. He also brags that he is the most conservative of the candidates. He catches hell for this some of the time -- for championing the city's crackdown on strip joints, for instance -- but not Sunday. "I appreciate your stand on morality," one man said. It is hard not to see this and wonder how much of what he does Buckhorn believes and how much of it is calculated. He did not enter politics from the right-hand side of the street. He spent eight years as chief aide to former Mayor Sandy Freedman, a liberal if ever there was one. He went from the mayor's office to City Council, where he made himself the Anti-Greco almost from the start. Now Buckhorn has a lot of what pollsters call "negatives" -- a fancy way of saying people don't like him. But he said this is only because he has been in a position where he is expected to take a stand, and taking a stand is sure to alienate somebody. Don't ask me who I think will win, because I don't know. Buckhorn predicts he'll end up in a runoff with Iorio. If he succeeds it will because he has worked so hard, and for so long, like a athlete better known for his steady, unspectacular practice habits rather than flash and dash on the field. What if he doesn't get it? Buckhorn has been so focused that defeat would surely mean a terrible, emotional crash. Then, after 16 years in government, he'd have to wake up in the morning, face the day and get a job like the rest of us. For now, though, Buckhorn's thoughts are on the prize and only on the prize. "I don't really think about second place," he said as he approached another front door, "because in this business there is no second place." -- Mary Jo Melone can be reached at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
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